We are sitting in a small lounge in Lenasia with two comrades who have been in the struggle for many decades. Both are ex-Robben Islanders; between them they have done over twenty years in prison. Back in 1955 Reggie Vandeyar was 23, and Shirish Nanabhai was just 16.

For Reggie the Congress of the People campaign marked his own increasing and more disciplined involvement in political organisation. He had been actively involved for some years, but by 1955 this involvement was becoming more substantial.

Vandeyar: I was born in 1932, in Newclare. My mum stayed there. But the family moved from pillar to post. I come from a poor family. My dad was from India. The old guy was drawn out here by stories of diamonds, and of gold buried under the streets of Johannesburg. He was into prospecting. He actually carried a little matchbox with him which was supposed to have diamonds in it.

We were a family of nine. By the time of my school-days, when I was a kid of six or seven, we finally settled in Fordsburg. I mixed with a lot of coloured, Indian and African kids. There were Afrikaner kids around too.

We were very hard up in those days. My mother worked at the laundry, for a bob (you know, a shilling) a day. I had to go and collect the shilling before my mother had finished work. It was my task to do the shopping.

She’d send me with a tickey to go buy coal. This Chinese chap sold tins of coal for a tickey. Instead, to have bioscope fare for myself, I used to go to the railway line. I had this pushcart. I’d load the pushcart with spilt coal.

Q: So you used to keep the tickeys for yourself?

Vandeyar: Ja, that type of thing! I was a bit of a drug pusher, too. These were the war years. The laundry man my mother worked for would take me with his horse and cart to the Crown Mines Camp. The soldiers would give me a shilling for a dagga pill. I would make sixpence on a pill ! Quite innocently! I did not know there was any danger in carrying this type of stuff.